SPECIALIZATION AND GRADING IN LIBRARY SCHOOLS
Although it is twenty-five years since library schools began, one may say that in a sense they are still in the experimental stage. And to say this is really praise, for when schools cease to experiment they are running along safely in ruts and have lost much of their vitality. The same period has been one of great expansion in library affairs,—not only has the country been covered with library buildings where before, to use a Western expression, "there was nothing but sagebrush," but forms of library work and extension have sprung up that were undreamed of twenty-five years ago, new methods have had to be found to meet emergencies and new conditions, social, industrial, and educational, and the library or library commission without several new ideas and aspirations per month is not thought to be doing its full duty. Add to all this progress the reactions that are going on, in library practice, in library architecture, etc., each a faithful reflection of some new light or of some old light looked at a second time, and the scene is one of activity paralleled, so far as the present writer knows, in no other field of endeavor, unless it be that of general education.
Several of the schools carry on an exercise called "survey of the field," merely to keep their classes in sight of this movement, and once a fortnight is not too often for such a class to meet—there is always fresh material for discussion.
A school, however, must experiment within reason and along its own lines. Because some small libraries and new branches are taking down their partitions or building without them is not sufficient cause for the advocacy of the practice in the schools; the much mooted question of the use of the accessions-book must remain for some time a mooted question in the schools—as long, in fact, as the conservative and radical libraries so evenly balance each other on the subject. It is not for the schools to practice or to teach library innovations—their business is to watch innovations and their results and report to their students.
It is open to the school, however, not only to watch but to forecast, to some extent. By dint of observing and listening, one who is not in the actual game often sees what is really happening or going to happen before some, at least, of the participants are entirely aware of it. An instance lies at hand in the subject of cataloging. Up to the present, this has been one of the backbone courses in every school-schedule, though the schools report regularly to their students the progress making in co-operative cataloging and the use of printed cards. As this use extends, it becomes more and more evident that cataloging is to be concentrated in a few expert hands and that most librarians are not going to have to be catalogers any more than the head of a commercial concern has to know by heart the price of every article in his stock, or than a manufacturer has to be able to do at a moment's notice what his expert subordinates are doing.
For the present, libraries still exist which make their own cards, and they still call on the schools regularly for librarians who can catalog, and hope rather than expect to get them. For, in spite of the fact that the schools still teach every student to catalog, as far as the student material will admit, students of their own volition seldom choose to be catalogers. Whether they too have sensed the fact that a change is coming and that the librarianship of the future will have more to do with the inside of the book and its application to the individual, with the handling rather than the making of tools, or whether they simply do not like what seems to them the probable monotony of cataloging, I do not know; but I think the schools will bear me out in the statement that cataloging as a specialty is not the first choice of many students. In view of these facts, I am ready to hazard the prediction that within ten years cataloging will be given in the schools as an elective; and that instead of making catalogs the majority of students will be led to consider the few main principles of cataloging and then taught better how to use and how to criticise catalogs.
Every instructor in cataloging knows that there are students whom it is a waste of time and vitality to try to make into catalogers, and every year good people go out from the schools who should never be engaged as catalogers and whom the schools recommend only for their qualifications for other work. Suppose we concentrated our teaching ability in this line on the students who would make good catalogers and who would elect the study—we should be working with the grain and not across it, the cataloging of the whole country would be uniformly well done instead of open to well-founded criticism in places, as it is now, and the time and strength of the instructor would be saved as well as those of the student whose forte lies in another direction. Another result would probably follow very quickly—more men would go into the library schools. I am told that the detail of cataloging seems to a man too much like making tatting, and one can easily understand that a person competent and eager to handle large matters or to fill an active administrative post would fret over anything involving as much minutiæ as the making of catalog cards.
However, while libraries in general are making their own cards, and while the smaller libraries have to have librarians who can turn their hands to anything, cataloging as well as the rest, it is unsafe for the schools to send out students without this part of the training. It is only as library conditions point overwhelmingly toward cataloging as a specializing study that the schools can change.
Librarians can help very greatly in the matter of specialization by encouraging it and employing specialists for special work wherever possible. Without depreciating in the least the value of an attractive face and an agreeable manner and of taste in dress, in library work as elsewhere, I may perhaps be allowed to put forward the opinion that the librarian who is choosing a cataloger should not be unduly swayed by these to the exclusion of the other requirements. Accuracy, legibility, knowledge of books, ability in research and a taste for it, all go to the making of a good cataloger, and it is discouraging for a school to see the graduate who possesses these qualifications passed over in favor of one who may have a pleasanter address but who can not do the work half so well. And women librarians are swayed by these considerations almost as much as men. The school can hardly be said to blame in such cases—it can only sorrowfully shake its head, knowing that if there is any discredit to be cast upon any one later, a great part of it will probably fall upon the school.
Setting aside cataloging as a specialty in the days to come, to what shall we devote the large place it has occupied in all the general curricula?
It is easy to see that with printed cards and expert service, catalog cards can be fuller in information, can be critically annotated, perhaps, can be made more often for analyticals, subject and author, and that the use of the catalog by the library assistant can be much more constant and more discriminating. Some time can be given in the curriculum to selecting from the catalog, securing from the shelves, examining and comparing the books on a given subject, with the result that the student can get a more thorough knowledge of its literature, greater facility in the use of a valuable tool, and may become more generally intelligent for the purpose of the selection and buying of books, and for recommending or the contrary.
Classification and the study of subject-headings are in themselves so broadening, furnish so good an exercise of the reasoning powers, and afford such fine views of the inter-relations of fields of knowledge, that I doubt if they can ever or ought ever to be set aside as special studies. The study of works of reference, however, offers so large and comprehensive a field that it seems to need division; and this brings me to the other subject of my title, that of grading in the schools.
Probably no one thing has made teaching more difficult, than the wide range of age and experience among the students. In the same class may occur and do occur continually the girl of twenty without much reading beyond high school and college requirements and the summer novel (unless she has fortunately grown up in a cultivated family with the habit of good reading and of discussing books), and the man or woman of from thirty to forty with a knowledge of books, an experience of life and society, and of thoughtful mind, who may have been successful in teaching or in some other profession; and in between range students of all degrees of cultivation, varieties of experience, and types of education. The training fitted for the first class wastes much of the time of the student at the other extreme, and if it be adapted to that extreme may be too strong or too complicated a mixture for the youngest student.
Grading would be expensive, for it would mean more teachers or more specialized teachers. In some of the schools the classes are not large enough to admit of so costly a proceeding; yet without grading, under the conditions described, the school belongs where the ungraded school belongs in the scheme of general education—it is delivering a scattering fire that may or may not hit its object. The entrance examination has been the device employed for unifying student-material in some schools, and it is much better than any other means, it seems to me; but though it may show what is the greatest common divisor of the candidates in the way of education and offer a definite point of departure for instruction, those who examine the papers see such differences, quite apart from the mere answers to the questions, as warn them that they are about to deal with a very varied assortment of intellects, a wide range of cultivation, and with necessities ranging from those of the steady, plodding follower who will never go further than an average assistantship to those of the born administrator or scholar. There is, to be sure, in such a class great benefit for the younger and less experienced students from contact with the others, from discussions that are a little over their heads, but, all the same, teaching addressed to the maturer intellect leaves the other with gaps unfilled, while teaching brought down to the level required by youth and inexperience gets the older student nowhere for the time being. The process is a sort of hitching along that should not be necessary in professional or vocational schools.
Suppose that grading be practicable so far as money and teachers are concerned. Where should lines be drawn? Often the younger person has the more flexible as well as more open mind and the older student may be a little set and may have ceased to take in readily new ideas. How to distinguish the students who can receive and assimilate readily the best and most that can be given? I should say that perhaps a month might have to be spent in making the division by actual testing of the students in class together. With this secured, two curricula might be offered, one prepared for the needs of each class with appropriate methods of teaching, and offering varied proportions of the same subjects. And here I revert to the teaching of reference work. For the higher grade it would be more inclusive, more difficult, dealing more with books in foreign languages, with books on unusual and recondite subjects, such as would be found in large reference or college libraries, while the lower grade might be adapted to the more elementary work to be done in small libraries or in branches.
The "moral" of this plan lies largely in the application of it. If the large reference or college library could be deflected from its main object, the securing of a competent reference assistant, by a sunny smile on the part of a lower grade student, the school's work in preparing the better student would go for naught so far as that library was concerned, and if this happened several times it would result in a confusion of values in the minds of the students. A + a sunny smile - a knowledge of the books would seem to be more than equal to B + a thorough reference equipment - a sunny smile. We may paraphrase here a well-known saying by asserting that, taking all things together, a librarian who can make his own choice of assistants gets the assistants he deserves, with the further assertion that the word personality, as often used now, does not get its full meaning; we forget that it consists not only of what one looks like and sounds like and apparently feels like but of all that one has made one's own out of the realm of knowledge, and all that one has assimilated and made profitable from one's experience.
The charge that the one year's general course is too full would probably become less true if or when grading was adopted. Only those subjects would need be given to a grade and those amounts of a subject which the students were capable of profiting by and the time saved could be used in more effective ways.
There is a very general desire to study administration among both older and younger students. So far as this means covering the whole routine of a library, with lectures on library relationships, management, etc., a course can easily be given; the difficulty arises when students wish to go out as administrators on the strength of such preparation alone; and when library boards send to the schools for students to fill administrative positions and expect the training to ensure administrative ability which, under the circumstances, can not be guaranteed. No matter how friendly may be the attitude of the library connected with a school, it is hardly willing to turn over any of its administrative work to students, nor could it be expected to do so. The ideal thing, of course, would be for the school itself to own a small library as a laboratory in which students could be tested for administrative ability under supervision. But this, too, would take money. When one sees the splendid endowment of a School of Journalism, a School of Technology, etc., one cannot help hoping that some day a School of Librarianship may be endowed which may employ the best of teachers and plenty of them, have its own ample collections, adapted to its needs, and establish its own library as a laboratory in which it may try experiments.
I have not yet touched upon the kind of specialization of which we have heard most in late years—the kind to fit students to be librarians of special libraries. I do not believe that the most energetic critic of the library schools would require them to teach engineering, commercial methods, law and medicine. A demand there certainly is from business houses and manufactories for librarians, but that is not enough for the schools. There must be a corresponding demand from persons wishing to be trained for such places. This, so far as I can learn, has not made itself felt. When applicants begin to come to the schools saying, "I intend to go into an applied science library" (or "an insurance library") "and I want to be trained for that work and that only," then the schools will have to provide such training or declare definitely that that is not a part of their field. Until such a demand arises from would-be students, it would be foolish for a school which has plenty of demand for general training and certain well-defined extensions of it to go outside this province.
A committee of the Special Libraries Association, I learn, is investigating the matter of preparation for special library positions, and it is to be hoped that there may be a very thorough inquiry, and that the committee will state definitely just what the association wants and what it believes to be proper training for such positions. Then the existing schools can decide whether or not they can give such preparation.
Meantime, a suggestion that institutes of technology might take up this special technical work and commercial schools the business library courses, etc., may be worth considering.
It has been suggested that the schools specialize among themselves, and to some extent that has come about naturally; for the school with especially good resources and unusual facilities for teaching a given subject, such as legislative reference or work with children, if it makes known its advantages, is very likely to attract the student who wishes to follow that line of work. Other reasons, however, often weigh more heavily—the location of a school, the personnel of the faculty, a smaller tuition fee, the general reputation and advancement of its graduates, etc.; so that any school may be called upon to give some special work of which perhaps it is not the best exponent. It cannot send the student elsewhere willy-nilly, and it does its best to give him what is wanted. As schools increase in number, a classification of them according to curricula is likely to follow, and this difficulty may be lessened. Even so, there is always the danger to be guarded against that students trained along one line may, through force of circumstances, take positions requiring a kind of training which they have not had. It would be impossible for a mining engineer to do the work of a mechanical engineer and vice versa, but in the work of an average library the cataloger and reference assistant and children's librarian must often change places, and any one of them, rather than be without a position, would as a rule try to do the work of the others. If all have had general training, this would not matter so much, but without that there would be considerable loss of efficiency.
In bringing this heterogeneous paper to an end—a paper which claims to be nothing more than a sort of thinking aloud on some of the problems confronting the schools, I wish to state some conclusions that I feel myself coming to: 1. That we need more good schools. 2. That they need to send out a larger number of trained people. 3. That we need longer, more thorough, and more systematic courses. 4. That with the larger schools some effort at grading is desirable. 5. That the schools would do well to get together and make a comparative study of their curricula, and their resources and facilities for special subjects, and map out tentatively a division of the field. This, while not binding upon any school, might serve for guidance, but no school should monopolize any one subject unless it is the only school having proper facilities for giving it.
Miss CORINNE BACON read a paper entitled